The most reliable route to a better career is more hours, pointed at the right thing, and everybody knows it. This issue shows you the math to prove it. It also names five facts about career growth that we all have watched happen in real life and somehow still refuse to truly believe in. But the time you put in is only one factor. An even bigger factor is courage. It works like this: you find courage first, that builds competence second, which ultimately results in confidence. The problem is that you wait for the last piece of the sequence to arrive first.

I am going to tell you nothing new today.

That is the point. Every sentence in this email is something you already know. You have known it for years. You have watched it happen to other people and you have explained it away each time. The gap in your career is not a gap in information. It is a gap in admission.

I’m German, so I’m direct by nature. Let me embrace that for the next thousand words or so.

Epictetus was a slave before he was a philosopher, so he had no patience for people who wanted results on comfortable terms. He wrote this addressed at somebody exactly like you:

Read the middle of that again. You will live and die an ordinary man. He is not saying that you lack the information or the talent. He is saying that you keep moving the start date, which is what everyone does all the time.

Seneca watched the same behaviour in Rome and put it like this:

In HEOR we say thinks like "after this submission." "Once the launch is done." "Next year, when things calm down." But nothing has ever calmed down. That is not what work does.

So here is what you get when you stop waiting and commit yourself to one thing instead.

Two people start the same job on the same day. Same degree, same manager, same ability. The first works five days a week and takes all of her annual leave. The second works six days a week and takes none of it.

A full-time work year holds 260 weekdays. Remove 25 days of annual leave and 8 public holidays, which is roughly the European norm. That leaves 227 days of actual work. Put your own country's numbers in if you prefer. The ratio barely moves.

Now add a Saturday to each week. The year becomes 279 days. Remove the annual leave as well, and it becomes 304 days. That is 34% more work in just one year.

Now do that for ten years. The first person works 2,270 days. The second works 3,040 days. The gap is 770 days, which is more than three extra years of full-time work.

Imagine both start at age 25. The first reaches a full 40-year career at 65. The second reaches the same total at 55. That’s 10 years earlier!

One extra day a week sounds small, and that is exactly why this works. It is 1 hour and 36 minutes added to each weekday. Nobody will notice it. The gap stays invisible until it is far too large to close.

Now the part that people leave out of career articles.

1. Nobody is coming to save you. Your manager thinks about your career for perhaps an hour a quarter, exactly when your development review is due, and they’re usually in a rush. You are waiting for a person whose total annual investment in your future is shorter than a good movie on Netflix. You know this. You still wait.

2. The person promoted ahead of you was not better. They were more visible. Harvey Coleman's model of advancement gives performance about 10% of the weight, and image and exposure the rest.¹ Argue with the exact numbers if you want. You cannot argue with what you watched happen. You called it politics, because "politics" is a word that lets you keep your position and do nothing to fix it. It’s an excuse, that’s all.

3. Loyalty is a discount that you give your employer. Every published wage tracker shows the same thing, year after year: people who change employer get bigger increases than people who stay. Your reward for ten loyal years is a below-inflation adjustment and a thank-you at the team meeting. If you’re lucky you get a cake for staying 10 years. I really hope that you’ll get a hell of a cake, considering all the lost income it cost you.

4. Your organisation will promote you until you are bad at your job. Benson, Li and Shue studied tens of thousands of sales workers and found that firms promote their best salespeople, whose teams then perform worse.² The Peter Principle is not a joke from the 1960s. It is measured behaviour. So the job that exposes you is coming either way. You only get to choose whether you meet it on your terms or on the organisation's.

5. You have never once been blocked by a lack of information. Everything your job asks of you is written down somewhere. Most of it is free. You have a search bar and, now, an AI that will explain any of it at midnight, in plain words, as many times as you need to hear it. The material was never the problem. You know it was never the problem.

Marcus Aurelius wrote the sentence that covers all five:

We do not argue with the arithmetic. We look for a cheaper door.

We read about the work instead of doing it. We follow the people who are already where we want to be, and we watch what they do. Twenty minutes each workday is about 75 hours a year, so this is real effort.

We rewrite the CV. We tidy up the LinkedIn profile. We collect certificates, and most people who start a short online course never finish it. We book the webinar and leave it running in another tab. We change the productivity app we use. We buy the fancy planner. We wait for a mentor. We wait for the performance review.

And yes, you are reading a newsletter right now. I make videos for a living. Neither of us is standing outside this list. We all delay the things that we should be doing.

Now look at that list again, because I had it wrong for a long time. It is not a list of cheap things. Twenty minutes a day is real effort and nine days is real time. So these substitutes are not cheaper in hours.

They are cheaper in embarrassment.

Every item on that list lets you look competent, with no risk that anybody finds you incompetent. Nobody has ever been humiliated by a certificate. That is the actual selection criterion, and it explains the list better than laziness does.

Seneca saw the behaviour, if not the reason:

We protect the salary and give away the decade.

They would not tell you to work Saturdays. I need to be clear about that, because it is the lazy interpretation and it is wrong.

Seneca kept his estates. Marcus Aurelius ran an empire and still wrote about how hard it was to get out of bed:

The Stoic instruction is not "suffer more." It is "choose, and then stop lying about the choice."

So choose. If you want your weekends, keep them. That is a one of the answers and I respect it more than the alternative. But then let go of the resentment, because you have decided, and the person who decided differently is not cheating.

What I don’t want you to do is keep taking time off AND keeping the grievance. That is the position almost everybody takes, and it is the only one the Stoics would refuse to allow you.

Here are three things you can do today to become more capable. There is no fourth.

Add hours. It works. You now know the price.

Add courage. This is the trigger in a sequence creates capability.

Waste fewer of the hours that you already spend.

Take the middle one, because it is the one people misunderstand most.

Ability is not a thing that you have. It is a thing that you develop over time, and it arrives in a fixed order. Courage first. Competence second. Confidence last.

You put your hand up for the work that you cannot yet do. You take the meeting that sits one level above your paygrade. You say "I will present that" before you know how. Then you are exposed, and you either learn the thing at speed or you fail where people can see it. That is how you build competence. Confidence turns up afterwards, as a receipt.

Yet, nobody approaches it that way. They wait to feel ready. They wait for confidence, which is the last item in the queue, so they wait for ever. Then they call the waiting "not the right time," and the queue never moves. After all, good opportunities only reveal themselves as such in retrospect.

And notice what the price is. It is not effort. It is humiliation, in front of the people whose opinion you actually care about.

That is the whole difficulty. It is easy to look stupid in front of strangers. It is very hard to look stupid in front of your own team, your manager, or the one person in your field whose work you admire. So we build careers that keep us away from that moment, and then we call the avoidance a strategy.

There is a story about how deliberately this can be trained. Diogenes the Cynic — whose school the Stoics grew out of — was seen begging for money from a statue. Somebody asked him why. He said he was getting practice in being refused.

That is the entire second lever, told as a memorable story, 2,300 years before somebody sold it back to us as a workshop.

Epictetus put the requirement in one line:

And Seneca gave the direction of travel, which is the part that everybody reverses:

Read the order in that sentence. The daring comes first. The difficulty is downstream of the fear, and not the other way round.

Starting something is always easy. Sticking with it is the difficult part.

Which leaves the third thing on my list, and the most brutal finding in this email.

Macnamara and colleagues pooled the research on deliberate practice across many fields. In games, practice explained about 26% of the difference in performance. In music, 21%. In sport, 18%. In education, 4%. In professions, less than 1%.³

Read that last number again, because it cuts every direction at once. Hours are not practice. Ten years in a chair is not ten years of learning. The person who works every Saturday without direction is simply tired in a more expensive way.

That is Seneca's real argument, and it is the line that everybody misquotes:

Seneca is talking about you!

Think about how you learned your own job. Almost none of us learned it in a sensible order. We learned it in the order that the work arrived. One skill because a deadline demanded it. Another because a client asked a question and nobody in the room could answer it. A third because somebody left the team, and their work landed on your desk on the Monday they were gone.

That order is random, and random order is expensive. You learn the same thing three times. You carry a gap for four years, because no project happened to expose it. Worst of all, you cannot see the edges of what you do not know, so you cannot plan around them.

Courage puts you in the room. It does not tell you what to learn once you are in it. Two people each put their hand up for work that they cannot yet do. Both were brave, and both deserve the credit. One of them then learns the job in the order that the panic delivers it, across four years. The other one has a map.

Only one of those is a good use of the courage.

Find the structured route through your own field, and take it, so that the hours after your courage are pointed at something. That is the third thing on my list, it works in every trade I know of, and the advice is free.

I built one of those routes, in my own field. It is health economics — a narrow and unglamorous corner of the world — so for many of you this will be the wrong course, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Go and find yours.

But if health economics is your field, or near it, then the route exists and I made it as easy to navigate as possible. It is the whole discipline in the order it is best learned, instead of the order that your projects deliver it. It will not give you courage. Nothing can, and anybody who sells you that is lying. It removes the part of the decade that random order wastes, so that when you do put your hand up, the hours after it count for something.

Up to you if you spent the decade or start the clock now to master the HEOR Fundamentals over the next 6 weeks.

Think about the last time you said "I'll do it" before you knew how.

What happened? And when was the last time you turned one of those down, and what did you tell yourself afterwards?

Hit reply and tell me.

Across 12 domains, the HEOR roadmap is a quick self-assessment against the 120 core skills of the field. Download it for free in less than 30 seconds, or spend 10 minutes customising it for a personalised breakdown of your gaps and what to work on next.

P.S. — Pharma Radar is written by Mirko von Hein. I help pharma and biotech teams navigate HTA submissions, cost-effectiveness modelling, and market access strategy across the UK, Ireland, and Germany. After a decade across IQVIA, Parexel, and Gilead, I'm now taking on selected engagements through Von Hein Consulting.